Summarizing Encyclopedic Term Descriptions on the Web

Abstract

We are developing an automatic method to compile an encyclopedic corpus from the Web. In our previous work, paragraph-style descriptions for a term are extracted from Web pages and organized based on domains. However, these descriptions are independent and do not comprise a condensed text as in hand-crafted encyclopedias. To resolve this problem, we propose a summarization method, which produces a single text from multiple descriptions. The resultant summary concisely describes a term from different viewpoints. We also show the effectiveness of our method by means of experiments.